Byron Rich ART Habens somewhere in between as the case most often seems. That was a bit of a novel, so I’ ll stop.
You are a versatile artist and I have highly appreciated the cross-disciplinary feature that marks out your multifaceted production and I would suggest our readers to visit http:// www. byronrich. com in order to get a synoptic view of the variety of your projects. While superimposing concepts and techniques from apparetly opposite spheres, as Art and Science, and consequently crossing the borders of different artistic fields, have you ever happened to realize that a symbiosis between different viewpoints is the only way to achieve some results, to express specific concepts?
I am in no way a student of the sciences. I cribbed a phrase from Paul( sorry Paul!), that being“ impassioned amateur”. I learn what I need to as I go. Sometimes I play with pseudo-science to point out the lack of scientific criticality and knowledge that seems to permeate contemporary culture, and sometimes I will get a little further into the sciences( still only dipping my toe into the vast expanse that science is). Science is important to me without question. I’ m absolutely fascinated by it. I wish I had the mind for it.
I firmly believe that scientists are some of the most creative people that exist. They are asking profound questions in pursuit of some kind of ultimate answer to the ultimate questions about who we are, where we came from, and what is possible in an unimaginably incalculable universe. People like Carl Sagan, Neil Degrasse Tyson, and Stephen Hawking have made some of these concepts accessible to me. The unselfish pursuit of scientists into answering some of the most complex questions is remarkable to me, so their willingness to articulate some of these massive notions into a form that I can digest is something I am deeply thankful for.
Artists can come at some of these questions that scientists are asking relatively unburdened by convention. At the intersection of Art and Science is where the cultural contributions can be most fully made in my estimation. Science will always be a borderline mystical practice to most people, much in the same way art making is. The performative nature of the lab parallels the performance that occurs in an artist’ s studio, at least to those outside the disciplines. When these performances collide, the ethical and philosophical boundaries of technologies, sciences, and the public policy relating to them, can be most deeply explored. The true innovators of this field are people like Paul and Steve, Adam Brown, Julian Oliver, and Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts of SymbioticA. They are asking the most important questions, and contributing to culture in a way that I aspire to. They exist as artists on the boundary of reality and fiction, probably my favorite realm to inhabit.
I would start to focus on your artistic production beginning from IMMOR( t) AL, an interesting project that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. What has at once caught my attention of this work is the way it brings to a new level of significance an impressive quantity of data: I think it ' s important to underline that your process does not forces concepts to relate that would otherwise be unrelated. Rather, you provide them of a stage of semantic amplification that extracts meanings where the viewers could recognize just a huge quantity of data to be deciphered. Would you like to introduce our readers to the genesis of this project? In particular, how did you manage the collaboration with to John Wenskovitch and Heather Brand to developed the initial idea?
IMMOR( t) AL is a strange project in many ways. It ties together rather disparate ideas and technologies into a semi-coherent form. The basic idea came about when I attended an incubator work shop in Buffalo, NY with Ionat and Oron. It was held at Big Orbit
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